Okay, this is just an opinion -- actually more of an hypothesis that might be proven or disproven by someone smarter than me ...

I was wondering what factors support Japan's tendency toward innovation. I mean, how come they keep coming up with new products, new services, new business models, entirely new categories?

Tokyo is often described as a place to go to to find and share new ideas.

Then it struck me: Maybe their fluency in innovation is partly a function of the very small number of attorneys Japan has. Exact counts vary, but in broad terms, America has 50 times more attorneys than Japan. It seems like it should only have about twice as many since the population of America is only twice that of Japan.

The risk of being sued if a new idea doesn't work out could potentially inhibit innovation. And that risk is huge here in America, but miniscule in Japan, even though Japan is ridiculously fastidious about product safety.

A friend once told me, as a result, that personal family airplanes in the US (like Cessnas and such) had not experienced significant design changes in more than 30 years because designers were afraid any new innovations might be construed as a legal admission that their earlier airplanes had been inferior or dangerous, resulting in a whole new category of product liability suits.

So fear caused by litigation designed to protect us might actually make us less safe, less productive, less happy. I don't know this for sure. It's just an idea I had. But the numbers sure look startling. Maybe we need more engineers now, not more attorneys. What do you think?

Some third party sources: http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2006/03/28/the-land-of-the-rising-number-of-lawsuits/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_system_of_Japan which actually says there are even fewer attorneys in Japan than the number I illustrate above. (In my graphic above, each little attorney represents 10,000 peers by the way.)